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If Wales beat France on Saturday to win a third grand slam in eight seasons, their head coach, Warren Gatland, will be asked to take charge of the Lions in Australia (and Hong Kong) next year. He is highly likely to get the job even if they lose. The Lions committee will meet after the Six Nations to draw up interview times for the candidates. The coaches of Wales, Ireland and Scotland have been approached, but England were passed over because they are under an interim management.

Gatland, like the Scotland coach, Andy Robinson, has been involved on a previous Lions tour having been part of the management team in 2009. He is a New Zealander, and the experience of the Lions the last time they went to Australia, with the Kiwi Graham Henry in charge, was not the happiest, although forgotten in the chorus of complaints made by some players during and after the trip is an absorbing Test series that saw the tourists rise above injuries and fatigue to take the Wallabies to the final minutes of the final international.

The coach will be expected to take a year's sabbatical if he is attached to a national side or a club. Robinson, who is bringing new coaches into his management team, is in no position to take time off with his side locked into a cycle of defeat while Ireland's Declan Kidney has gained a reputation for being overly conservative.

The contenders outside the national set-ups are Ian McGeechan, who was in charge of the 1989, 1993, 1997 and 2009 tours, and the former Ireland coach Eddie O'Sullivan, who is looking for work after taking the US to the World Cup. Gatland, though, is the head coach-elect.

The Welsh Rugby Union reacted to Henry's ordeal in 2001 – he returned home to find his authority undermined by some of his Wales players in Australia who were unhappy at being dirt-trackers – by issuing a decree that prohibited their coaches from having any future involvement with the Lions. It lasted only one tour. Gatland, Shaun Edwards and Rob Howley went to South Africa in 2009. The decree had been privately edited so that any Wales coaches with the Lions had a subordinate role. They were not in charge so that if a player had an issue with selection, the head coach could be blamed.

If Gatland takes the Lions to Australia, the decree will be in bits. The tourists would want his sabbatical to start at the end of the season so that he would not lead Wales for the three-Test series against the Wallabies in Australia in June. The fear is what psychological impact a whitewash would have.

The WRU would have to approve the appointment. Assuming Wales win the Six Nations, regardless of whether they achieve the grand slam, they will have built on their achievement of making the World Cup semi-finals. Is it the right time for Gatland to be taking a year off? He left his management team in place, having in November 2010 said he intended to shake it up after the World Cup, so Wales would have continuity, but given what happened to them after 2005 and 2008, when grand slams proved a one-off rather than a launch pad, can the WRU afford to risk success again turning to dust?

Gatland has achieved what no Wales coach has since the 1970s; the successful rebuilding of a team. When he was given a new four-year contract in autumn 2010, the decision was far from popular in Wales among former players or supporters, even less so when Ryan Jones was dumped as captain minutes after the draw with Fiji in Cardiff.

The rumour swirl suggested Gatland had lost the dressing room. Players, so it went, were struggling with his honesty, not just in private but to the media: his immediate reaction to the yellow card received by Alun Wyn Jones against England at Twickenham in 2010, which sparked a 17-point spree by the home side, was to excoriate the second-row for his stupidity in tripping Dylan Hartley. Gatland said the act had cost Wales the game. Some of his players were unhappy that one of their number had been humiliated, although Jones said he felt Gatland had been right, and as a team they seemed to stagnate on the field.

Last season, Wales won only one match in Cardiff, and that was thanks to a mistake by the referee Jonathan Kaplan against Ireland. They finished the Six Nations on a low in Paris, and a World Cup pool that included South Africa, Samoa and Fiji looked an obstacle to progress.

A year on, Wales are the most proficient team in the Six Nations. They have lost the sparkle of Shane Williams and eschewed the subtlety of James Hook and Gavin Henson (who is injured again) in midfield, picking one of the biggest back divisions ever seen, but honesty is now a feature of the team.

Wales are mentally harder than they have been since the 1970s, a product of their gruelling training camps in Poland last summer when the players were pushed to the limits of their endurance, discovering what lay within. They can see themselves. Wales do not play with the inhibition they showed in 2005 or the innocence of 2008, when Gatland used the bench to change play tactically. They are more calculated, less inclined to rushes of blood; they make fewer mistakes and react quickly to the unexpected.

Gatland wants Wales to thrive not only in the Six Nations but to challenge New Zealand, South Africa and Australia on a regular, rather than an occasional, basis. That means securing at least a triple crown next season and taking the series against Australia to the final Test. That is more likely to be achieved with Gatland at the helm than if he is given shore-leave. Wales have not built on success since the 1970s and cannot waste this opportunity, especially as Gatland has built Wales out of very little with the country's four regions in dire financial trouble. If the Lions see no alternative to Gatland, they should be told that a year-long sabbatical is not an option.

Lancaster success shifts goalposts

Has England's Six Nations campaign brought clarity or confusion to the Rugby Football Union as it considers whom to appoint as permanent head coach? It has become a different job from the one that became available after the World Cup when Martin Johnson resigned as team manager and the RFU launched an inquiry into events in New Zealand.

England were at their nadir. A head coach coming in would have not only been given carte blanche to impose himself and his methods on the squad, he would have had a job to make things worse. The only way was up. It is different now. Stuart Lancaster was appointed as interim head coach, assisted by Andy Farrell and Graham Rowntree, and England go into the final Six Nations weekend with a chance of retaining their title, even if they are not in charge of their destiny.

Did the RFU, when it appointed Lancaster, expect him to lead a revival? Three of the five matches were away and while England had never lost to Italy, they had not won at Murrayfield since 2004 and France, the World Cup finalists, were the favourites to win the Six Nations.

In other words, was a factor behind his appointment the expectation that he would, if not fail, not be seen to succeed? England had shed a layer of experience with players retiring after the World Cup and Lancaster closed the door to others. It was very much a new team that went to Murrayfield on the opening weekend. The RFU had by then drawn up the job description for head coach and it had clearly not been written with Lancaster in mind; it was as confused as England had been tactically in the World Cup.

Was the union looking for a performance director, director of rugby or head coach? All three rolled into one as it stressed the importance of relationships with commercial partners and the media as well as success on the field? Were Lancaster in the middle of a full-time contract with the RFU, his position would not be up for debate. England may not have dominated their opponents – the results of all four of their matches would have been altered by a converted try – and they may not have done much in attack, but where they started from has to be remembered. They are progressing.

But it is precisely because England have turned the rubble of the World Cup into something habitable that the position of head coach may become less attractive to someone like Nick Mallett. There is no blank canvas any more. The RFU chief executive, Ian Ritchie, is right to say the appointment cannot be made on a wave of emotion after the victory in Paris last Sunday, although that would be harder to resist should England beat Ireland decisively on Saturday and finish top of the table with Wales falling against France.

The panel making the appointment has to be coldly objective. There have been enough examples in recent years, Wales in 2005 and Ireland in 2009 among them, when gains made by coaches in their first years were squandered afterwards. Can England go to the next level under Lancaster?

What the panel also has to consider is the changed nature of the job because of the strides made under Lancaster. It cannot bequeath Lancaster to another candidate: he would be a focal point for any discontent should the head coach decide to retrace the steps taken by England this year and head off in a new direction.

So it becomes not just a question of whether Lancaster should get the job permanently, but whether what he has helped achieve in the past two months has made it harder, not easier, for someone else to succeed. Would the repaired morale of the squad be jeopardised by bringing in someone else?

The RFU will not make a quick decision. Lancaster will be interviewed after the Six Nations and the recommendation of the five-man panel, headed by Ritchie, has to be ratified by the board of directors. The next board meeting is on 21 March, which may be too early for the panel to have reached its decision. The next one is a month later, but one could be arranged at short notice.

Then there is the position of team manager. Whoever fills that position will depend on who get the head coach's job. Someone like Mallett would make the manager's job more a political than a rugby one; Lancaster would probably be supported by an adviser, a former player who had enjoyed success in an England jersey.

Lancaster is burning with desire to become the permanent head coach. He craves the job. It is not, on its own, a reason for appointing him, but he has changed the criteria.